The Dick Gibson Show (6 page)

“It gives them the sense they’re not alone.” So he took back with him a hundred and twelve instrumentals, plus an armful of recordings by a few choral groups—rejecting, for example, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians’ rendition of “In the Merry, Merry Month of May” in favor of the Utah Military Institute’s Marching and Singing Soldiers’ version of the same song, and the Brockton Riding Academy Mounted Chorus’s “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”

Furnished with these he returned to KROP and put them on the air. He could hear through his long afternoon record show the adulterated strains of the vaguely decomposing music he played, performances that the wind might have blown through, or the sea squeezed. Usually he no longer bothered to announce the songs. Remembering the Credenzas’ warning, he made sure that no dust stuck to the needle. He oiled the turntable, lifted the tone arm smartly when a record was finished and placed it carefully in the right groove of the next selection. Every few minutes he moved his head a precise seven inches from the microphone and gave the time and temperature twice: “It’s two thirty-five. It’s two thirty-five. The temperature is fifty-three degrees. It’s fifty-three degrees.”

He had never been to England and so had never heard the BBC, but he had an impression that this was what it must sound like. He had a sense, too, of service, a special nonprofit feel of a government- managed, tax-based, public utility, as if the story he told the music librarian at the radio station in Lincoln somehow had come true. Giving the time and temperature, he imagined his voice coming out of loudspeakers in the dining halls of prisons or the card rooms of veterans’ hospitals. He liked this. In a way—though it had come about in a manner entirely different from the one he had counted on when he had approached the brothers—he felt exactly the responsibility he had hoped to feel.

His nervousness began to relax its hold on him, though he did not tamper with its effects. Now his constraint was designed, a technique, and he acquired still another sense of his professionalism, a wicked inside knowledge of his own manner, the same knowledgeable sensation available, he supposed, to workers on newspapers who see the headlines before they hit the streets—a split-second edge that was all one needed to maintain a notion of his uniqueness and to confirm his closeness to the source of things.

“I had never had it before. But what did I have? What did I have exactly? A knowledge of what time it was and what time it was getting to be? Access to the weather report? The sequence in which the records would be played that afternoon? What I had was inside information about myself, what
I
was going to do, what particular shape my dignity would take next, how much shyness or reserve would be there in the next time signal, what unmood would be provoked by the next unmusic I played.”

But that only got him through the afternoons. The music, however transatlantic and anonymous, was the point. He merely served it, bringing it to the turntable like a waiter, his presence hidden in his deference, his shyness only the giver’s decent effacement. If it weren’t for the music, however, and the time and temperature, he would have been lost, so though the fright did not actually return, it waited for him like that portion of a sick man’s day when the temperature climbs and the pain begins.

Doing the news that followed his afternoon record show, for example, and recalling the brothers’ insistence that he make more palatable the inevitable reports of accident and sudden death with a deflective cheer—they meant, he supposed, no more than that he lift the pitch of his voice—he felt enormous pressure to oblige, pressure that existed even as he read those stories that had nothing to do with disaster: neutral items about the sale of farms in adjoining counties, or the paving of the dirt road that led to the new dam. He knew what was coming up, and like some unsure singer who knows of a difficult passage later in his song that he has negotiated hit and miss in rehearsal, he could anticipate only those bad places in the road where the car turned over and the children died, and felt his throat begin to constrict, his mouth to dry, his teeth to dry too, like hard foreign objects suddenly in his mouth. So, even as he continued to read the report of the new engine purchased for the volunteer fire department and what the governor said in his address to the Building and Loan convention, he would sound a little hysterical, and once or twice when the time came for him actually to give the damaging bulletin, he lost control entirely. Aiming for the C above high C that was the perfect pitch the Credenzas wanted, the exact and only comforting tone of catastrophe for them, his voice broke, he overshot and gave them not perfect pitch nor even imperfect pitch, but
wild
pitch, shattering the decorous modulations of radio with falsetto, with something close to a real shriek or scream. Someone hearing him might have thought it was
his
child who had burned to a crisp in the fire,
his
wife raped and slain,
his
father struck down by the lightning or fallen into the thresher.

After these performances he waited to hear from some angry Credenza, not even returning to the transmitter shack when his relief man came for fear they would phone the moment he left the station and not wanting to add anything to their already considerable rage should they miss him. So he sat by the telephone to wait for their call.

It didn’t come.

Nor did it come the next day or even the next time he lost control of himself and, too keen, keened the ferocious grief of his mistakes. He knew, of course, that he was vulnerable now, that this time he would surely hear from the Credenzas. When he didn’t he realized that they were giving him not leeway but rope. He took their unspoken hint and went the other way entirely. To save himself he went the way they had told him not to go. Now when he came to those bulletins he laughed openly: “Early this morning—along the Lake Baxter rim road—a car with two pa-ha ha-hass-engers went out of contro-ho ho—l, and h-hit a t—a tee—a tee hee—tree. The passengers, Ha-ha-ha-rrr— ho ho—ld, Ha-ha rold and Haw-haw Hortense Sn-sn-snick, were be- ha ha-headed.” The engineer stared at him. “It’s seven minutes after four,” he ad-libbed. “It’s seven minutes after four.”

Still the call did not come. It was clear; they meant him harm. He returned to the shack as soon as he was finished with his shift and asked if there had been any calls for him. The transmitter man did not even look up.

“Have there?”

“The injuns want you to their picnic,” the man said.

Still frightened, but made willful by his fear, he determined to force a confrontation, convinced that only through a showdown could he ever hope to negotiate his brotherhood with the Credenzas. He eliminated from his repertoire all those human interest stories they loved, and selected only bad news to read. He gave it euphorically, blithe as Nero. Some Credenza cattle had come down with disease. A few had already died. He gave the news of these fatalities with a chipperness nothing less than ecstatic. He’d heard from one of the hands that when disease had broken out on a ranch he had once worked in Texas, the herd had to be shot. He took this gossip and repeated it over the air. “An undisclosed but reliable source high up in Credenza management,” he said, “is already speculating that the entire herd may have to be slaughtered.” He added that it was better economics to cut one’s losses at once than to drag out hope, meanwhile spending more on feed each day for the sick beasts.

He seized on every rumor available to him—desultory talk among the farmers about the expectation of a severe winter, random chatter of a decline in the price of dairy or a dip in grains—and presented it as the hard inside information of experts. If rye prices were expected to be disappointing, he carefully pointed out that the Credenza interests were heavily overextended in rye. His weather reports were jeremiads. If the sun was shining in northeast Nebraska he found a storm gathering in western Canada and spoke darkly of the prevailing gravity of weatherflow, its southern and easterly shift from its fierce source in the Bering Strait.

The engineers and transmitter men and the other announcer, silent as the Credenzas, pretended to ignore his new antics. He supposed that they were under instruction, that the Credenzas, fearful of tipping their hand, wanted him to continue for a while in his fool’s paradise.

“At the time of the tone,” he announced on his record show, “it will be three-thirty.” Then he coughed brutally into the open mike, dredged up phlegm from deep in his chest, and made the lubricious rattle preparatory to spitting. “It’s three-thirty. It’s three-thirty.”

And often when he played his records now he deliberately kept the key open on his table microphone, thus adding even more hollowness to the already bloated convention-hall vagueness of the music.

Then, almost two weeks to the day since he first began his campaign to get a rise out of the Credenzas—the record on the turntable was “Asleep in the Deep,” sung by the South Philadelphia A.C. Girls’ Aquacade Chorus and recorded at poolside—he purposely brushed his elbow against the switch on his table mike, and beginning not only in mid-sentence but in mid-syllable so that it seemed accidental, he said in perfectly controlled, conversational speech, as if to a guest with him in the studio, “ … rstand that Charley’s wife, Grace, and Poke Credenza have been seeing a lot of each other lately. More than it’s usual for a brother- and sister-in-law to see each other. More than it’s even
legal,
if you know what I mean. Well, what the hell, Charley Credenza’s been down at Lincoln with the legislature two months now. Grace told him she couldn’t be away from the house that long. Couldn’t or wouldn’t. Anyway, she’s an attractive, healthy woman, even if she is too heavy. Poke likes them big, I guess, though why he didn’t marry a large woman in the first place instead of that furled umbrella of a Lucy, I can’t say—unless of course the talk is true that he had to. Come to think of it, it might be true at that. That woman has hot pants. Did you see the way she was riding Louis III’s right leg at the Fourth of July dance, and how she put her hand on
his
ass? I thought there’d be trouble, but old Poke was making out too good with Grace even to notice. Wait a minute, I’ve got to take this record off … ” Then, as if he hadn’t noticed that the switch was already on, he turned it off and, extending the myth of the accident, spoke into the dead microphone: “That was ‘Asleep in the Deep.’ We hear now ‘Come Josephine in My Flying Machine’ in the new instrumental version recorded by the Association of Missouri Underwriters.”

He faced the engineer and winked, but couldn’t get the man’s attention.

He went back to the transmitter shack convinced that at last he’d torn it, and when he got there things
did
seem different.

For one thing the beds were empty. Carpenter, the off-duty engineer, in whose car they had returned to the shack without speaking, hung around only long enough to pick up Mullins, the off-duty transmitter man; then they had gone off to town together. Murtaugh, the other transmitter man, was not by his equipment but had gone out behind the shack to check a guy wire on the tall main transmitter. Alone, the cramped, submariney quarters seemed almost spacious to him. He lay down on his bunk and it occurred to him that except for those few minutes in the outhouse when spurning the new flush toilet he had vainly sought Credenza brotherhood by emerging himself in what he took to be the Credenza smell, despite his knowledge to the contrary—he knew they were only the anonymous and corrupt smells of former staff, an indiscriminate odor that was no longer shit but shit’s shit, chemically changed, fermented to something beyond the strongest wine in the world but vineyardy still, acrid and eye-searing, smelling not of the cozy, snuggish intestines at all but of fire, or of sun gas perhaps, if you could get close enough—this was the first time in the months since he had come to work for them that he was by himself, without an engineer, without a bunkmate, without anyone.

Then he heard the radio.

“I knew it was no accident I was alone, that the Credenzas had anticipated me, that plans had been laid in advance, that Carpenter and Mullins now worked as a team, that the Credenzas picked up their check and they rode to town on Credenza gasoline to toast my disaster in Credenza beers. Still in my bunk I looked out the single window at Murtaugh, the transmitter man, squatting on his heels by the base of the antenna fooling with a wire and I thought: you lazy bastard, is that what Credenza (they had become one enormous undifferentiated persona for me now) pays you for? Climb, bastard, decoy me at something better than ground level. Ah, old sealegs, a little at least sweat, please! Make those picturesque adjustments up in the mizzen of that thing. Lazybones, landlubber, less decorousness in your game, if you don’t mind. Murtaugh must have been left by him (I meant the Credenza brothers, and the wives and sisters too now) as a sort of staff sentinel and shill, a nice philosophic touch. Can a man fall in the forest if there’s no one by to hear him scream?

“I heard the radio and realized that’s how it could come, my fate a spot announcement perhaps, or a bulletin, or maybe he would come on the air himself and read out my doom in some Credenza fireside chat: ‘We’—strangely, Credenza, the single merged nemesis did not mean ‘we,’ he spoke for himself but had slipped royally into the inverted synecdochic—‘have not lightly arrived at our decision to speak out this evening. No one not in our situation can know the ponderous personal gloom and wrenching loneliness attendant at these levels of responsibility. It gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. But despite our hopes for an amelioration of our difficulties and maugre our four times forebearance, those hopes have foundered. Sadly we needs must admit the priority pull of necessity and lay at once the claims of all soft sentiment. We have decided to act—whatever the cost in dashed hopes and even, we may say, lives. No matter that it gives us the headache and we would rather be in heaven on a picnic. We needs must, perhaps, go into a little of the background of the situation. We must needs indeeds lest what is devastating seem harsh.